Effortlessly synthesizing the most interesting research currently underway in the study of sensory perception, while exploring the blunting influence of various technologies, Stehlíková uses her own life and artistic practice as a throughline connecting a splendid panoply of embodied insights. An intersensory and interdisciplinary feast, the book will likely induce a fine derangement of the readers senses.
- David Abram, author of The Spell of the Sensuous and Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology
This book represents a fascinating account of the artists sensuous journey. It is intriguing to see how the author incorporates concepts such as embodied cognition, sensory dominance, synaesthesia and so on as part of her own very personal journey as a film-maker. There is plenty of food for thought, quite literally in her discussion of the Icelandic Journey experiential multisensory dining event, for the interdisciplinary sensory scientist to come away enriched by.
Charles Spence, University of Oxford
Exiled from our Bodies is a strongly and clearly argued reminder that the arts continue to be grounded in our deep sense of being and the activation and interplay of all our senses. All arts express and mediate our relations with the world and the critical views of this writer apply in the entire realm of the arts. The argumentation is rooted in the authors personal convictions in the cultural and human values of art, wide reading of relevant literature and her personal exchange through years with thinkers, scholars and artists in the cultural and human meanings of art.
- Juhani Pallasmaa, architect and former professor, Helsinki University of Technology
Tereza Stehlíkovás Exiled from Our Bodies arrives at a moment when many of us feel the lingering aftershocks of enforced digital life that continue to mediate our sense of reality. In this book, the CzechBritish artist and researcher asks what it might mean to resist such mediation, and to reclaim our existence in all its multi-sensory depth. At once memoir, philosophical reflection, and artistic inquiry, the book is both intimate and wide-ranging. - Seisma
Exiled from Our Bodies is a remarkable addition to the Sensory Studies series edited by David Howes. The book offers a deeply reflective exploration of how digital technologies and screen-based mediation estrange us from embodied, multi-sensory ways of knowing. Blending autoethnography, artistic research, and philosophical inquiry, Stehlíková invites readers to rediscover sensory presence as a foundation for creativity, ethics, and ecological awareness. Insightful and beautifully written, this work reaffirms the arts as vital tools for reawakening our capacity to feel, perceive, and inhabit the world attentively. - International Sociological Association Newsletter
